"Instant win" lottery tickets are now in widespread use in many areas. These tickets consist of a game card that has a game play area printed thereon with a number of predetermined spot that are covered with thin, opaque latex coatings. The card usually contains a separate area on which a back-up verification code is printed, which area is also covered by a latex coating. This latter area is usually marked "VOID IF REMOVED" and the card will not be honored if any part of the overlying coating has been removed prior to redemption.
The cards are sold over the counter in retail establishments and the purchaser selectively removes some of the coatings with a coin or other implement to reveal the underlying information. Depending on the game mechanics, the purchaser must match or "beat" other printed areas on the card to determine whether the card is a "winner". If the card is a winner, it can be immediately cashed by presentation to an agent in an establishment that sells the cards to obtain a predetermined cash award.
In many prior art cases, validation of winners was performed manually. After the card was presented for cashing, the agent followed the game mechanics to determine the winning value. Usually, in such cards, the amount of the win is printed somewhere on the face of the card. Next, the agent obtained a verification code generally located under one of the latex coatings in the game play area to verify the prize amount. The agent then removed the latex coating in the "VOID IF REMOVED" area of the ticket to reveal the backup verification code, and, if the backup code matched the verification code, the ticket was deemed validated. In some cases, for example, for relatively large cash prizes, the agent was also required to telephone a central lottery administration office and provide the ticket validation number, in order to obtain final authorization to pay the prize.
Once a ticket had been cashed, it had to be returned to the lottery administration so that a final validation could be made and the agent given final credit for the prize payment. Accordingly, it was common practice for an agent to accumulate paid winning cards and separate them by prize amounts. The number of winners for each amount was tallied and entered on a settlement sheet. Bundles of paid winning tickets were then placed in a settlement bag and the bag number was entered on the settlement sheet. At the selling establishment, a lottery field representative checked a settlement sheet and locked the settlement bag to prevent fraud. A courier hired by the lottery then transported the locked settlement bag to the central lottery office for validation. After being validated, the paid tickets were then destroyed.
Although the aforementioned system worked, there were significant accounting and ticket handling burdens for the selling agents and the system was prone to clerical errors. In addition, there were potential problems with illegal activities including cashing of altered tickets, theft of paid tickets from the selling establishments, and the cashing of stolen tickets.
Accordingly, computerized cashing apparatus was developed so that tickets could be validated by a central computer. In this scheme, each ticket selling establishment has a remote computer terminal connected to the central computer. In addition to the regular information described above a computer-readable code was printed on the lottery tickets, which code that identified each ticket uniquely to the computer. Usually this code was in a bar-code form and bar code scanners attached to the remote terminal were used to read the code, the information in the code was then forwarded to the central computer for validation.
With such a system, information required to validate a ticket was stored in the central computer on a disk memory. Therefore, when a ticket was redeemed, the ticket could be marked as paid in the central computer and the ticket could not be cashed again. Further, the ticket did not need to be physically returned to the central lottery location to be destroyed. This latter system removed the incentive for attempting to cash altered or stolen tickets and for stealing paid tickets from the selling locations in order to cash them again. It also reduced clerical errors, improved agent controls and significantly reduced the accounting and handling burden for the selling agents. The computerized records also provided the lottery with more timely and accurate information relating to winners.
However, problems remained with system response time. In many lottery systems, the total number of tickets processed by the system can be thousands to hundreds of thousands of tickets per day. In some systems, information for each ticket was stored in a large disk file and the remote terminal at the agent's location was used to access the disk at the time of ticket redemption while the winning purchaser waited so that the ticket could be marked in the computer disk file as paid. Consequently, each ticket validation required an on line access to the disk file to determine if the ticket was a winner and whether it had already been paid. If the ticket was an unpaid winner, a subsequent disk access had to be made to mark the winning ticket as paid. With this type of system, the large volume of disk transactions caused long delays in response resulting in selling agent and ticket purchaser frustration and in consequent loss of ticket sales.
In order to improve response time, other prior art systems stored information regarding tickets in the main memory of the central computer. In this latter system, the validation number on the ticket is used to access the main memory locations so that no disk accesses are necessary to validate a ticket. However, the main memory necessary to accommodate information for all of the tickets quickly becomes prohibitively large for any reasonably-sized lottery system.
Still other prior art systems store information in the computer main memory for only those winning tickets which have small awards. In these latter systems, the lottery tickets are printed in numbered packs or books and the book number is encoded into the validation number printed onto each ticket in the book. The validation number is read off the ticket during the validation procedure and forwarded to the central computer, where the validation number is decoded to determine the location in the main memory at which the winning ticket information is located. However, it was still necessary to access a disk file to determine the prize value in the case of small amount winning tickets or to determine if a non-small amount winning ticket was a large amount winning ticket. Consequently, disk accesses were necessary for each ticket scanned into the system. Nevertheless, this system reduced the number of disk accesses required to process a winning ticket because, after a ticket was determined to be a winning ticket, the ticket could be marked as paid without the necessity of a further disk access. Therefore, system response time was reduced, but when a large number of tickets were being cashed, the system response was still slow.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a ticket validating apparatus and method which minimizes the time taken to validate a ticket.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validating apparatus and method in which most tickets can be validated without accessing a disk file.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validating apparatus and method in which sufficient information to validate most tickets is encoded into the ticket validation number.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validating apparatus and method which is suitable for cashing instant-win lottery tickets and which can accommodate various lottery ticket structures.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a ticket validation apparatus and method which can disable stolen tickets and prevent them from being validated.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a ticket validation apparatus and method which can quickly check for agent fraud.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validation apparatus and method which greatly reduces selling agent and central administration accounting burdens.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validation apparatus and method which eliminates the need to return paid tickets to the central location for destruction.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a ticket validation apparatus and method which improves the overall accounting of ticket validation by providing accurate reports and analyses.